Moon Child Ruins the Earth
by wbyeets
Summary: Moon Child, the feisty young Pokémon trainer who recently became Alola's first League Champion, sets out on a quest to capture and imprison the guardian deities in her PC—no matter the disastrous consequences.
1. Chapter 1

**1**

 _Mischievous Moon Child... The Professor Gives a Warning... The Storm Gathers_

* * *

"MOON, CHILD, **NO**! BAD, MOON, **CHILD**! MOON, CHILD, **NO**! BAD, MOON, **CHILD**!"

The crowd gathered at the foot of the hill leading to the Ruins of Conflict chanted this refrain in a single group voice again and again, some through bullhorns and others with their hands cupped around their mouths, hoping that, against all odds, Melemele Island's immune system would find a way to expel the invader before irrevocable damage was done. In the back of the crowd, old women and children were weeping and comforting one another under wide black umbrellas that seemed to suggest premature surrender to death, despair, destruction, doom. In the front, wielding shovels and sticks and frying pans, were Melemele's strongest. Hau and his grandfather Hala were there, standing on a high scaffold that the news media had built and staffed with binocular-wielding reporters.

"We are live from the Melemele Ruins of Conflict," said a grave young news anchor into the eye of a rolling camera, "waiting to learn the fate of the island, and, indeed, all of Alola itself. We are unfortunately only now realizing the disastrous effects of allowing Moon Child, the once-popular young Pokémon trainer who disbanded Team Skull and recently became Alola's first Pokémon League Champion, to amass unchecked power. This eleven-year-old girl, who just moved to Melemele from Kanto, has become an unstoppable force of destruction and answers to literally no one, least of all her mother."

"Moon Child, enough!" screamed Moon Child's mother from beside the news anchor. She pulled at her face in helpless terror. "This is too much! If you disrupt Tapu Koko, the whole island will be plunged into chaos!"

Far off, visible thanks to her unusual red hat, Moon Child could be seen standing in the mouth of the Ruins of Conflict, where none but she dared tread.

"It's okay, mom!" Moon Child called back. "I've got my Pokémon with me!"

The crowd erupted in boos. Professor Kukui suddenly appeared in its middle, standing on the back of a Tauros as if surfing. He lifted a bull horn to his mouth.

"That's the problem, ya?" his electronically-amplified voice bellowed. "Your Pokémon are too strong, pal! It don't even matter what move they do! They're _all_ the ultimate move! If any of your Pokémon so much as breathe on poor Tapu Koko, that thing gonna probably die, ya?"

"MOON, CHILD, **NO**! BAD, MOON, **CHILD**!" the crowd chanted.

"Don't worry guys, I'll be okay!" Moon Child yelled, and then ducked into the ruins. The crowd's chant dissolved into an amorphous scream. Overhead, storm clouds had begun to gather and flicker ominously.

"This looks bad," the news anchor went on, watching over the trees as Moon Child disappeared from view. "Moon Child has just entered the Ruins of Conflict, where she apparently intends to—to abduct _Tapu Koko_ , the guardian deity of Melemele. The consequences of Tapu Koko's removal from the ecosystem cannot be overstated. Tidal waves are predicted to slam the shores and annihilate most living things within days, and evacuation has already begun. Fisherfolk who anticipated this terrible event have been fleeing in their boats to Akala Island for weeks. Others are being transported by road and rail to the island's highest points. Citizens of Alola, we have come to—quite possibly—our darkest hour."

Over the dismal sounds of the gathered onlookers suddenly came Moon Child's triumphant cry: "Salazzle, use Flamethrower!" And then there was a horrid, heart-wrenching screech that seemed to pierce the soul itself—the wail of a defeated guardian deity. A bolt of lightning immediately lanced from the sky and blew up Professor Kukui's lab, sending flaming boards cartwheeling into the surf and shrapnel ripping through the miles of surrounding tall grass.

"Oh no, ya!" the Professor yelled, falling from the back of his Tauros into the crowd.

"Run!" yelled the news anchor, casting aside his microphone and leaping from the scaffolding into the branches of a nearby palm tree.

"Moon Child, why?" Hau asked quietly as chaos erupted all around him. "Why, _why_?"

Lillie took his hand and tried to lead him away from the rampaging crowd and gathering storm. "We have to go, Hau!" she screamed. Wind and rain began to whip down from the sky in heavy sheets. "We have to evacuate! Moon Child has damned us! She's damned us _all_!"

Hau looked again toward the ruins, wondering if it would be the last opportunity he would ever have to do so, and then turned and ran for cover with Lillie.


	2. Chapter 2

**2**

 _Captured!... R.A.T.T.A.T.A. Versus Moon Child... A New Deity Is Named_

* * *

Tapu Koko lay wheezing at Moon Child's feet.

"Nice job, Salazzle!" Moon Child said. "I knew you could do it."

Tapu Koko rolled one bloodshot eye, the one that hadn't puffed completely shut, toward the feisty young trainer. It huffed a breath in, then let it out. The eye slowly closed.

"Poké Ball, go!"

Moon Child whipped a Poké Ball at Tapu Koko and struck the defeated Pokémon on the arm. The ball bounced off, drew Tapu Koko inside, shook three times, and clasped.

"Bzzzzt!" cried Moon Child's Rotom Dex. The Dex tumbled out of her bag and swung itself up to hover in front of her face. "Wowzers, friend!" it exclaimed. "You just caught the guardian deity! Err, are you sure that's wizzzze?"

"Why wouldn't it be? I'm on a Pokémon adventure," Moon Child replied.

"I guess that'zzzz true. Well, what should we do with Tapu Koko now that it's your legal property?"

"Hmm. Send him to the PC, I guess," Moon Child decided.

Rotom looked worried. "You're not even going to uzzzze him on your team?" he asked.

"Nah. Alolan Raichu is my electric guy. Alolan Raichu for life!"

"Well, uh… zzzzzt," Rotom said uneasily, and zipped back into Moon Child's watermelon bag.

Something felt wrong. The air itself seemed to have changed since Moon Child had gone into the Ruins of Conflict intending to dethrone Tapu Koko. As she exited the mouth of the ruins, a bolt of lightning ripped down into a nearby tree and transformed it to a splintered charcoal stump. Moon Child covered her face as flaming debris flew past her. "Dang!" she shouted. "What a storm!"

Far below, along the island's shoreline, she could see the tide starting to take the wreckage of Professor Kukui's Pokémon laboratory out to sea. People and their Pokémon raced around in a blind panic, nothing more than black dots from this altitude. A siren situated somewhere near Hau'oli City screamed into the wind and rain. It sounded like one of the World War II air raid sirens Moon Child had learned about in history class before she had dropped out of the fifth grade to become a Pokémon trainer.

"Zzzzt, hey, buddy?" Rotom asked sheepishly, springing once more out of Moon Child's bag. "Maybe we'd ought to put Tapu Koko back. What good is he going to do you inzzzzide the PC, anyway?"

"Get back in the bag, Rotom!" Moon Child yelled. She stuffed Rotom back in. "The Professor told me to catch as many Pokémon as I possibly could. You don't want to disappoint the Professor, do you?"

"Moon Child has got to be stopped," Professor Kukui thundered the following afternoon, bringing one clenched fist down upon the surface of his podium with a hellacious bang. Assembled before him at the Iki Town square were members of the newly formed R.A.T.T.A.T.A. force: the Righeous Alolan Trainer, Teacher, and Thug Alliance. Members from every segment of Alolan society had jumped at the chance to help organize an anti-Moon Child army. Numerous Pokémon Professors were there—Professor Kukui, Professor Oak of Kanto, the unsettlingly handsome Professor Sycamore from far off Kalos, and even timid Professor Elm, who had chartered a private plane to bring him from Johto to Melemele late last night. Countless trainers of all stripes and colors stood around the square, menacingly tossing Poké Balls containing their most fearsome Pokémon up into the air and then catching them again. Ex-members of the notorious Teams Rocket and Skull had decided to put aside old grudges and join up for the sake of the greater good. There were employees of the Aether Foundation, desperate to prevent further damage to the Alolan Pokémon ecosystem. Red and Blue, the battle legends of the Kanto region, had turned up and brought Brigette, the scientist in charge of maintaining the Pokémon Bank system, with them. Even Lillie and Hau, standing together near the front of the crowd, were primed and ready in their sleek black R.A.T.T.A.T.A. combat uniforms.

Professor Kukui, at the podium, leaned forward and clenched his teeth as he looked over the crowd.

"Moon Child is just a kid, ya? But she's off her damn chain!"

The crowd roared in agreement.

"Catchin' a buncha Pokémon is one thing. But when you catch the guardian deity and turn the whole island upside-down, that's quite another, ya?"

A few members of the crowd turned and looked up the hill to the site of the ruins, where Tapu Koko had been caught. Nihilegos now swooped merrily through the sky above it, free to wreak whatever havoc they chose. Lillie shuddered.

"We gotta stop her before she destroys Alola!" Kukui roared.

"Let's put her in jail," Officer Nanu said with a crooked grin.

"Bury her in Mudsdale dung!" Hapu added.

"Take all of her Z-Crystals and Mega Stones and throw them in the garbage," said Mina. She blinked as people turned to look.

"Put _her_ in the PC!" Professor Oak screeched angrily. Bill, the Kanto computer scientist who had developed the PC system of Pokémon storage, gave Oak a sagely nod. Suggestions soon began flying every which way.

"Turn her into a Meowth!"

"Break her Wii-U!"

"Give her back to the hospital where she was born!"

"Shoot her off into Ultra Space!"

"Let's take an ad out in the paper that says, 'Moon Child is the worst,' and have an unflattering picture of Moon Child next to it."

"Put her in the washing machine!"

"Calm down, cousins," Professor Kukui scolded from the podium. "We can't hurt no little kid, even if she _did_ ruin Melemele Island and shame her family forever and ever. But we can definitely beat the pants off her Pokémon, ya? They're not people, are they?"

Blue, from Pallet Town, stepped forward. "Hell no they aren't!" he shouted.

"But before we get around to that, we have to appoint a new guardian deity, seeing as how Moon Child locked ours in the PC. We've had expert hackers working 'round the clock to bust Tapu Koko out, but it's pretty slow going, ya? Turns out Moon Child's firewall is pretty much invincible."

"I nominate Rattata," a boyish voice said. The crowd gasped and parted in the middle to reveal the one and only Youngster Joey, fresh from his savage journey to the Celadon City department store. He stood with his blue ribbon Rattata wriggling in his arms. Rattata bared its teeth and added, "Rattata."

"Good. Put Rattata up there in the ruins, where it can guard us," Kukui told him.

"De, ity, Rattata!" the crowd began to chant. "De, ity, Rattata! De, ity, Rattata!"

Lillie and Hau looked at one another warily.


	3. Chapter 3

**3**

 _Psychedelic Lovebirds... The Storm Progresses... Guzma Talks Some Sense_

* * *

Lillie could tell right away that Youngster Joey's Rattata was not going to turn out to be a very successful guardian deity.

She had gone along with Youngster Joey and his Officer Jenny escort to the Ruins of Conflict to see Rattata installed as the new deity, and things had started seeming fishy practically from the word go. It didn't take Lillie more than a few minutes to figure out that both Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny were completely out of their skulls on hallucinogenic drugs.

"Here you go, Rattata!" Youngster Joey had cried happily. He hoisted the struggling rodent into the air as if presenting it for inspection. Then, still carrying Rattata high above his head in both hands, he galloped clumsily up the steps leading to the stone altar.

"You're so _fast_!" Officer Jenny cried, laughing and slapping one of her thighs in pure amazement. "How are you going so _fast_?"

"Rattata in the skyyy—with diii-amonds," Joey sang. His Rattata finally managed to squirm free and leap to the top of the altar where Joey couldn't get him.

"You want me to leave you some fruit snacks so you won't get bored while you're guarding the island?" Youngster Joey asked. Rattata gave him an uneasy look. "Rattata," it then breathed, and shook its little head _no_.

Youngster Joey shrugged. "Your loss," he said. He spun his cap around backward. Then he spun it another 180 degrees until it was forward again. Then he took it off, removed a small white square of paper hidden inside the cap, and put the square on his outstretched tongue.

"Are you sure Rattata knows how to be a guardian deity?" Lillie asked cautiously. She was standing near the corner, far back from Joey and Jenny. "He doesn't look very confident."

"Are you kidding?" Youngster Joey said. "This is a top tier animal! Rattata defeated Mewtwo!"

"What! Really?"

"Heck yeah. He soaked a hit with Focus Sash, Endeavor'ed Mewtwo down to 1 HP, and then used Quick Attack on the next turn, baby. It was so sweet." Youngster Joey glowed with pride. It was true: his Rattata, despite only being Level 8, really had killed Mewtwo using that strategy and saved Kanto.

"Have a good time up there, Rattata!" Officer Jenny called. She gave a huge, double-armed wave. "Give us a call if you get too scared!"

"Rattata," Rattata said, glancing this way and that.

Lillie, Youngster Joey, and Officer Jenny walked out of the ruins. Youngster Joey was sweating like a madman. "It's a good thing Rattata is the new Melemele deity," he said. "I bet you he takes care of all this destruction and madness…" For a moment Youngster Joey looked at his hand as if trying to remember how to work it. Then he snapped his fingers. "…Just like that."

"What about those purple tornados?" Lillie asked, shielding her eyes with the flat of her hand. Purple tornados were stabbing down from the thunderheads and twirling trees, houses, and people up into the sky. Tapu Koko had had more to do with the stability of the weather than anyone realized.

"Rattata will deal with it. It's his problem now."

"I guess I just didn't think Moon Child would really _do_ something so irresponsible," Lillie told Hau and Guzma that evening when they were sitting at a table in the Pokémon Center having dinner among other evacuees.

"Y'all is stupid, then!" Guzma shouted. He gripped the table with both hands in an effort to keep himself from flying too far off the handle. "Moon Child is wicked evil, yo! You got any idea how many times she and her Salazzle beat my team up so bad I literally pooped in my pants?"

"I think I realized there was something wrong with Moon Child when she gave Nebby such a clobbering," Lillie recalled. "Right after we played the flutes together and Nebby evolved into Lunala. Moon Child knew I wouldn't be able to stand seeing Nebby endure any more pain than it already had, but she didn't care. She had Salazzle do a Flamethrower on Lunala, and that was all it took. The poor thing screamed like a warthog and fell to the ground. Defeated with one attack. Then she _caught_ Nebby. And just dumped him in the PC along with the rest of her prisoners."

Guzma shook his head. "I'm scared of Moon Child," he admitted.

"So am I," Hau said. He had barely spoken all evening. "Lillie's right. Moon Child has got something wrong with her brain. Remember at the Trainer School, when she got called to the office after only like ten minutes?"

"I couldn't believe that!" Lillie cried.

"Moon Child is bad, yo," Guzma told them. "I been telling y'all that this whole time."

Suddenly, screaming could be heard from outside the Pokémon Center. Lillie and Hau jumped up and ran for the door, intent on finding out what was happening. The second they got outside they found out: Moon Child had just flown overhead on the back of Charizard and carelessly rained cinders down on the evacuee tent city.

"My poster!" screamed an old woman, holding a long tube of shiny paper that had been set alight by Charizard's passage. "It's irreplaceable!"

"Where is she headed?" Lillie asked. She watched Charizard's trail of fire snake away into the eastern sky.

"She's going to Akala next," Hau said in a voice thick with despair. "She's going to try to catch Tapu Lele, too."

Guzma slammed his fist into his hand. "Yo!" he screamed.


	4. Chapter 4

**4**

 _The Coffee Incident... Tapu Lele In the Crosshairs... Youngster Joey and Captain Mina_

* * *

Professor Kukui and his vigilante cabal of Pokémon trainers were not the only ones interested in stopping Moon Child's rampage.

General H. G. Peckerham of the Alolan Air Force opened a classified email at his desk while holding a large cup of coffee in one of his meaty paws. He took a sip as he read the first line. The first line said, "11-year-old has captured Tapu Koko—monsoon and tidal waves currently rocking Melemele—1st estimates are 150 dead, 4000+ displaced."

General H. G. Peckerham spat the coffee onto the laptop screen and dropped the mug into his lap where the coffee began to burn his penis. He screamed and rose to his feet, which knocked the desk over and sent the laptop crashing to the floor. Now he not only had a lightly scalded penis, but could not finish reading the rest of the email, which had been interesting enough to set in motion a chain of penis-burning events. Peckerham howled with fury. His bushy grey eyebrows quivered. It was bad news for Moon Child, who had just made a powerful inadvertent enemy.

Meanwhile, Moon Child was soaring along the coast of Akala Island, making Rotom tell her where Tapu Lele was located.

"Er, why do you want to know, friend?" Rotom asked.

"Why do you think, Rotom? Tell me: what kind of animal is Tapu Lele?"

"She'zzzz a Pokémon!"

"Exactly. And what is my favorite thing to do to a Pokémon?"

Rotom's electronic face turned into a frown. "Give it a very wide berth, of course."

"Wrong!" Moon Child thundered. "Catch it!"

"But friend!" Rotom protested. "Remember what happened on Melemele when you caught Tapu Koko?"

"Everybody cheered my name and then a siren went off."

Rotom flickered unhappily. "All right. Let me Google it." Rotom disappeared for a few seconds while he connected to the internet. Then he came back, looking less happy than ever. "I found out where Tapu Lele lives," he said.

"Yes!" Moon Child pumped her fist. Rotom did not tell her this, but she reminded him momentarily of Bastian, the main character from The Neverending Story, cheering atop Falkor like a corny little bastard as the two sailed through the sky.

"She lives in the Ruins of Life, to the south." Rotom made a buzzing sound and tried to be accidentally caught by a wind current that would rip him out of Moon Child's hand and send him plummeting into the ocean, where he would never be coerced into locating victims for her again. Unfortunately Moon Child's grip was strong, and Rotom remained where he was.

"Charizard! To the Ruins of Life!"

Charizard loosed a guttural roar and swooped leftward. While Charizard and Rotom and Moon Child headed toward the scene of their next crime, Youngster Joey was back at the evacuee tent city on Melemele, making a new friend in Captain Mina, the sleepy-eyed artist from Poni Island. They had been organized into the same squadron of the R.A.T.T.A.T.A. army.

"I feel like we have very similar interests," Youngster Joey told Mina as he flipped through her sketchbook. Every single page was an elaborate drawing of a pot leaf.

"What do you mean?" Mina asked. Joey lifted up his shirt and showed her his giant pot leaf chest tattoo.

Mina thought about this for a while. While she was thinking, Officer Jenny came running over waving a handgun.

"Get away from him!" she screeched. "I've known him ever since I was just a Lass Jenny! Homewrecker! Get away, go!"

"Whoa," Mina said.

Youngster Joey leapt up to restrain Officer Jenny, but she had already effectively restrained herself by catching one foot in the fabric of someone's tent, tripping, becoming tangled, flying past Joey and Mina, and rolling all the way down the hill to the beach in her tent cocoon. Her service revolver fired random shots in all directions as she tumbled.

"Was that your mom or something?" Mina asked.

"Nah. She's just some cop that follows me everywhere."

Mina's eyes grew large. She took her sketchbook back and snapped it closed. "I have to go wash the paint out of my hair now," she suddenly informed Youngster Joey, and took off running for the Pokémon center. Joey sighed and began to roll a joint. The storm hadn't yet begun to break. Over the water, sickly green-yellow thunderheads crashed together and reformed. It seemed like everything here was going bad at the same time. Part of him hoped that Professor Kukui's next deployment orders would station him someplace far away.


	5. Chapter 5

**5**

 _Team Skull Tries To Stop the Inevitable... Dwayne's Prosthetic Nightmare... Mina Gets an Acid Flash_

* * *

When Moon Child went blasting over the Ruins of Life on Charizard's back, she observed that there was a gang of tough-as-nails ex-members of Team Skull guarding the entrance, watching her through binoculars. She circled around the ruins twice, came in low, and and then leapt from Charizard, who was not expecting to be suddenly dismounted and lost his equilibrium. Charizard tumbled the last few yards to the ground like a mushroomed bullet, roaring and thrashing.

"Friend! Please be more careful with Charizard," Rotom cried from Moon Child's hand as she elegantly stuck her landing on the grass in front of the Ruins of Life.

"Get back in the bag, Rotom!" Moon Child jammed the Rotom Dex into her watermelon bag and zipped it closed. The Ex-Skulls came forward, drawing around her in a loose semicircle.

"Yo! Are you the punk ass bitch what caught Tapu Koko and messed up Melemele Island so bad?" demanded one of the gangsters closest to Moon Child. He made emphatic arm gestures with one of his arms as he spoke. He had to make extra gestures with that arm because the other one could do no gesturing at all; it was artificial, carved from wood, and stood rigidly away from his shoulder like a length of pipe. "I got a sister on Melemele!"

"My name is Moon Child, not 'Yo.' Now stand aside, Arm Boy. I'm on a Pokémon adventure."

The one-armed Ex-Skull scowled and shoved little Moon Child as hard as he could. Her head whipped forward so sharply her chin nearly struck her breastbone, and she lost her footing. Moon Child crashed to the ground. She also landed on her watermelon bag with her hip, which brought an angry crack from inside. She knew at once that it had been Rotom's screen. As if in confirmation, Rotom made a muffled electronic sound of pain.

"Oh man, that's it," Moon Child said. She climbed to her feet and plucked one of the Poké Balls attached to her belt.

"Yo, she want to battle!" one of the other gangsters said.

"Go, Scizor! Get that wooden arm!"

Moon Child hurled her Poké Ball. It broke open in midair and her Scizor came out. Scizor was a ferocious six-foot-tall cyborg insect man with fluttering wasp wings, lobster pinchers for hands, three spikes for a head, and a chainsaw for a soul. He was Moon Child's most frightening Pokémon friend by far.

"Get it! Rip it off!"

" _Sciiiizor_!"

The Ex-Skull tried to move away in time, but Moon Child's Scizor was much too fast. It easily grabbed the man's wooden hand in one of its pinchers and gave a terrific yank. The wood cracked and splintered and broke free at the elbow.

"Yo!" the gangster shouted, staggering backward. "Yo, time out! That's my _prescription arm_!"

"It's my arm now," Moon Child corrected. "Scizor: throw my arm off the island."

The Ex-Skull member wailed, helpless to do anything but watch as Scizor flung his prosthetic arm over the side of the cliff. A few seconds later, it could be heard crashing on the rocks below.

"Yo, she got Dwayne's arm!" one of the gangsters in the back screamed. "That's where he kept all his power!"

"Run, dawg!" another shouted.

The Ex-Skulls broke and scattered. Some of them called insults over their shoulders at Moon Child, but it was clear that Scizor's show of dominance over the one-armed Dwayne was to be the final word on the matter.

"This ain't over," Dwayne informed Moon Child in a hoarse, teary voice. "I'm gonna get you back for this, dawg." Then he scurried away with the rest.

"She got my arm, man," he told one of the other Skull grunts a few minutes later, when they had all fled to a presumably safe distance.

"I know," the other grunt said. He reached out and touched the jagged remains of Dwayne's wooden arm. "I ain't never having kids, man. Look what kinda evil deeds they capable of."

Inside the mouth of the ruins, Moon Child unzipped her watermelon bag and carefully removed Rotom. A crazed spiderweb of cracks had drawn itself from the top left corner of his screen down to the bottom.

"Are you okay," Moon Child asked.

"Bzzzzt," Rotom replied. His face flickered to life behind the cracks. "Of course, friend! Now we're even cooler! Having a cracked Dex screen just means you lead an exciting enough life to have cracked it zzzzomewhere along the line. I still work!"

Moon Child hugged Rotom to her chest and then put him back in the bag. What an optimistic and wise little guy he was. She was also glad he was still operational, because her Dex insurance did not cover accidental damage.

Back on Melemele Island, Captain Mina was still hiding from the police inside the Pokémon Center when she received a terrifying psychic flash. She gasped, went to a table, and sat down. Mina was lightly telepathic, as are all proponents of better living through psychedelic chemistry, and her third eye had just looked upon a dreadful future in which Tapu Lele had already been captured and stuffed into the PC with Tapu Koko and Nebby and all of Moon Child's other Pokémon. Tapu Lele had nothing to do with the weather, so Akala Island did not have to worry about monsoons or tidal waves, but she _was_ in charge of everyone's mental health. In the future Mina had just witnessed, Lt. Surge, one of Kanto's gym leaders, who happened to be visiting Akala on gym business, had lost his mind without Tapu Lele's stabilizing influence and gone completely apeshit in downtown Heahea City. Surge was tearing down the avenue in a stolen golf cart, fishtailing wildly and throwing nine-volt batteries at pedestrians. Surge's Raichu was using its electricity to supercharge the golf cart's tiny motor, so the police could neither catch nor stop him.

If there was one thing Mina hated worse than a jealous police officer, it was a Mobile Infantry meathead like Lt. Surge. She leapt to her feet and dashed through the sliding double doors of the Pokémon center. She paged her own Charizard, jumped onto its back without even slowing down, and blasted up into the eastern sky, toward Akala, with fury in her eyes and a blazing trail of cinders in her wake.

"And _stay_ out!" Officer Jenny screamed indignantly from the beach, where she was still having difficulty detangling herself from the tent.


	6. Chapter 6

**6**

 _A Meeting In the Sky... Lt. Surge's Fate Decided... Peckerham Plots Revenge_

* * *

Akala Island was a far more modern place than Melemele. The residents of Akala believed in the scientific method, broadband connections, instant noodles, and Ambien, and they had mostly forgotten about their guardian deity. Tapu Lele went about her duty of protecting the island's sanity in the background, keeping things quietly propped up like an effective congressional representative that nobody can remember electing. The backwater hicks of Melemele blamed everything on Tapu Koko, good and bad; when rampaging hoards of Yungooses swarmed the crops and reduced the island's annual yield to nothing, that was Tapu Koko's fault, and he received no shortage of angry letters and prayers on the topic. When the sun shined and the waves were high and Professor Kukui's nipples could stiffen in anticipation of catching a few on his surf board, that was also the work of Tapu Koko. But Akala assigned no such responsibilities to Tapu Lele. She was like the island's distributor cap: no one cared about her or what things she was doing until she stopped doing them and caused Lt. Surge to steal a golf cart and a box of nine-volts and go for a ride.

Moon Child never even found out that she had been the catalyst that put Lt. Surge in that golf cart. As soon as Tapu Lele was captured and jammed into the PC with Tapu Koko, she got back on Charizard (a different one—the one she'd jumped off of and caused to crash would no longer do business with her) and flew away. She and Mina actually crossed paths in the sky, making brief but intense eye contact as Mina sped toward Heahea City, hoping to intercept Lt. Surge before it was too late.

"You idiot!" Mina screamed as they zoomed past one another.

"What the heck?" Moon Child wondered, gazing over her shoulder at the back of the other Charizard as the distance between the two riders grew. "Hey Rotom, did you hear that?"

"Kind of, friend! Captain Mina called you a Pigeot, I think."

"I thought she said 'video.'"

"Maybe she said 'indigo.'"

"Or maybe it was 'internet.'"

"no UR the internet," Moon Child texted to Mina. Mina read the text. She thought for a little while about its possible meanings as she and her Charizard circled Heahea, looking for golf carts. She decided not to respond.

It was already too late, of course. Tapu Lele was removed from the Ruins of Life and sanity had been removed from Lt. Surge. He sprung awake in his hotel room feeling strongly that the people of Heahea needed to be taught a lesson: a lesson about electricity.

"Dese numbskulls are gunna loin one way or da other," he informed Raichu, who had also gone crazy without Tapu Lele's influence.

"Rai- _CHUUU_!" it said.

"Yuh're right!" Lt. Surge cried. He hopped out of bed, completely naked, and put on one sock. "We _should_ throw batteries at da people!" Surge took his crazy Raichu into his crazy arms, still dressed in only one sock, and left the hotel.

"Mommy, I can see his snake!" a little girl proclaimed as Lt. Surge walked past her family's picnic with the huge electric type Pokémon squirming in his arms.

"Don't look, Kelsey!" the mother screamed, shielding her daughter's eyes with the sandwich she had been holding.

"Rai-chuuu?"

"A golf cart?" Surge said. "Great idear, Raichu!" He stopped and turned his eyes to the fleet of golf carts parked in front of the hotel. One in particular called out to him. Lt. Surge went over to it, his naked buttocks grinding against one another like large white stones.

While all this was going on, General H. G. Peckerham was briefing his men on the situation.

"It's lightly scalded," he told them in a voice heavy with regret as he marched back and forth across the front of the room with his hands clasped smartly behind his back. "No serious damage, but quite painful. I've applied Vaseline."

"Sir?" asked a new recruit. "What does this have to do with us?"

"Sit down, private!" Peckerham bellowed. His neck wattles and jowls fluttered angrily. "You're the best of the best, and that means you have a need to know. The balls were fortunately unharmed."

"Sir, I really don't think we—"

"Shut your mouth, private, and listen! I am suffering topical reddening of the skin that Nurse Joy thinks should clear up in a day or two. Thankfully, I was wearing two pairs of underwear for good luck when the incident occurred, or we might be in even direr straights right now. One of my thighs also sustained a non-life-threatening burn, but it's really the penis I'm most concerned with."

The enlisted men scribbled down notes as Peckerham talked.

"We will retaliate immediately, from every direction, and without mercy or remorse," he said. "Bandages will be applied if necessary. I will be taking photographs of the affected skin on an hourly basis and distributing them to each and every one of you for transparency's sake."

"I'm sorry sir, did you say 'retaliate'? Retaliate how, and against whom?"

"We must bomb Melemele into the sea," he replied proudly. "Nothing will remain of that insufferable rock when I'm through with it. It will be a black ruin, completely uninhabitable for thousands of years. I've also banned emails, and coffee. An incident like my penis scalding must never be allowed to happen again. Is that clear, men?"

"Yes, _sir_!"

"As you were, then." H. G. Peckerham strode from the room and slammed the door behind him.


	7. Chapter 7

**7**

 _Clarence J. Fork... An Old Man Interferes... Questions Arise At the Ruins of Conflict_

* * *

Lt. Surge was a lonely thirty-seven-year-old man whose absent father had called him "Scout" and "Big Guy" and whose absent mother had been physically present but hopelessly addicted to Paralyz Heal throughout his entire adolescence. He was not a real lieutenant and had never served in any military in any capacity. His name was also not Surge. Lt. Surge's birth certificate listed his true legal name as Clarence J. Fork. The middle initial did not actually stand for anything.

Clarence J. Fork had an enormous square jaw and rippling musculature that covered his bones and organs like a coat of overlapping armor plates. His eyes were extremely small and set far apart. The way he preferred to wear his hair could best be described as "the starfish look." Clarence did not have any friends except for his Raichu, to whom he had never revealed his true identity. And now that Clarence J. Fork had finally gone crazy, that true identity had ceased to exist. In his damaged mind he was only Lt. Surge—a powerful Kantonian gym leader who had fought in an imaginary war between electric Pokémon and water Pokémon and who received government disability payments because of his speech impediment. That last part was actually true, although the payments now confused him because the checks came addressed to someone named Clarence J. Fork.

Lt. Surge planted his naked buns in the seat of his chosen golf cart and had Raichu start its engine with a Thundershock. He backed up in starts and stops, unfamiliar with the cart's manual transmission. Once he had it in drive, he raced along the sidewalk at speeds approaching twelve miles per hour. His tremendous physical bulk caused the cart to lift precariously up onto two wheels each time he turned, and because he was crazy, he only turned in gigantic dangerous swerves that made it look like he was being chased by someone.

In fact, he _was_ being chased: by Mina.

As Lt. Surge rattled down the sidewalk, Mina came in for a landing on Charizard. "There!" she cried, pointing at the swerving cart. Charizard slid to a stop on the hotel's front lawn, drawing a long black scorched path behind him. Mina gave Charizard a friendly pat on the neck and then climbed down, tore off her helmet, and got into another of the hotel's golf carts. The chase was on.

Lt. Surge was at first quite dismayed to realize that he had a pursuer. He did not want Mina to look upon his naked body because Mina was very pretty and he was just an ugly buffoon. He was thankful that he had remembered to put on a sock, because that meant Mina wouldn't be able to see that foot. But she would be able to see the rest of him if she caught up.

"Fastuh, Raichu!" he bellowed, slamming his palm down on the cart's miniature steering wheel. Raichu screamed and channeled another blast of electricity into the motor. The cart lunged forward. Terrified Akalan pedestrians leapt out of the way. An old man who had also gone crazy because of Tapu Lele's capture pushed his walker out into the road where it would be run over by Surge's golf cart. The cart hit the walker, mangled it, dragged it for a few feet, and then trapped it around one of the back tires in a clinging metal cage that made right turns extremely difficult to manage. Surge was now doomed to a leftward course that would take him into downtown Heahea.

"Raichu!" he bellowed. "Find somethin' ta throw!"

Raichu discovered the box of nine-volts hidden in the cart's travel compartment and brought it up to the passenger seat. "Ex-uh-lent!" Lt. Surge cried. He took a fistful of batteries and threw them over his shoulder at Mina. She ducked as the batteries banged against her cart's dashboard.

"Stop!" she ordered Lt. Surge. Surge looked back at her, saw that she was gaining on him, and turned left down a side street. Mina, also racing along at twelve miles per hour, followed.

Another person who was having a terrible day was Youngster Joey's Rattata, the new guardian deity of Melemele Island. Rattata had been woefully underprepared for the transition to deity status. He had no plan to combat the purple tornados, which were still ripping along the coastlines and destroying everything in their paths, and he was similarly unsure what to do about the Nihilego infestation that had recently sprung up. Tapu Koko had been a natural check on the Nihilego population, and without him around to kill each and every one as they emerged from the Ultra Wormhole, the Nihilegos were having the times of their lives flying all over the place and doing all the moves they wanted.

"Rattata!" Rattata shrieked, dodging an Acid Spray that a Nihilego had just rained down upon the altar at the Ruins of Conflict.

"What about my crops?" cried an indignant Melemelean farmer whose crops had just been swept up in a purple tornado. "Lord Rattata, you have to do something! Our livelihood depends on it!"

"He's right, Rattata," Professor Kukui added. Kukui was standing at the head of a crowd of Rattata's worshippers who had come to the ruins to see how the new deity was going to fix everything. "You the guardian deity now, and that means you gotta step it up! Chop chop, cousin! Let's get a move on! All these Ultra Beasts and natural disasters ain't just gonna take care of themselves, you know?"

"Rattata," Rattata said uncertainly as he backed himself into the corner and bared his teeth.

"What you gonna do about the weather, huh?" Kukui continued. "Tapu Koko always knew what to do. What the hell kinda guardian deity are you, anyway?"

"Rattata."

"Where's the little jokester who gave us this Rattata?" Kukui now wanted to know, turning back to the crowd. "Where'd Youngster Joey go?"

"I saw him on the beach about an hour ago," said a lady somewhere in the middle of the crowd. "He was gnawing on a handful of spindly brown mushrooms and yelling, _'This! Oh yes! Absolutely! These new colors are perfect, and they're for all of us!'_ And he was laughing and kicking his legs in the sand and then he vomited."

Professor Kukui's nipples stiffened as the suspicion that they were all in very deep shit began to descend upon him.


	8. Chapter 8

**8**

 _The Shit Nobody Gave... Tie Her Up!... Dwayne's Prosthetic Nightmare, Pt. II_

* * *

Lillie agreed with Hau that Moon Child was up to more shenanigans, so they acquired a Charizard from the R.A.T.T.A.T.A. motor pool and set off for Akala. They touched down on the southern rim, near Heahea, planning to ask around and find out if Tapu Lele was okay. The plan hit a snag when they discovered that many people did not even know who Tapu Lele was.

"That annoying pop singer?"

"No, Tapu Lele, the guardian deity of Akala Island. The Pokémon that lives in the Ruins of Life."

"Oh," said the woman they were talking to. She shifted her bag of groceries from one arm to the other. She felt uneasy about talking to a pair of children dressed in sleek black combat uniforms. "Yeah, I never really got into Pokémon. But my daughter likes it."

Lillie and Hau went into the Pokémon Center across the street and asked Nurse Joy.

"A Tapu Lele? I don't think anyone's ever brought one of those in before."

"Well," Lillie said, "there is only one of them. She lives on Akala Island and presumably does some pretty important stuff."

"Honey, if she isn't helping me pay my student loans, then she's not doing a damn thing for me."

Lillie and Hau left, discouraged.

"Maybe it's okay for Moon Child to catch Tapu Lele, then," Hau opined. "Since nobody even gives a shit about her."

That was when they saw Lt. Surge and Captain Mina come blasting down the street at twelve miles per hour in a pair of rattling golf carts, apparently drag racing. Surge was alternately laughing and sobbing, and, as they watched, he took a nine-volt battery from a box on the passenger seat and threw it at a man jogging on the sidewalk. The battery hit the man in the face and he cried out.

"Stop, in the name of Albert Hofmann!" Mina shrieked. Surge was still in the lead. Lillie and Hau turned their heads slowly to watch the carts go past them and head deeper into Heahea's downtown district.

"I think God has turned His eye away from the Alola region," Lillie said. "Permanently."

"Raichu!" Lt. Surge's voice bellowed from the end of the street. "Don't let her look at my dong! Raichu! She's gonna look! I'm embarrassed!"

"No, God has nothing to do with this," Hau said. "This is pure Moon Child right here."

Lillie gaped. "You think Moon Child is to blame for that naked man in the golf cart?" But before she had finished asking, she had realized what a silly question it was. Of _course_ Moon Child was to blame. Hau was exactly right—this reeked of her dastardly influence.

"Damn," Lillie said softly, and clenched her fists in front of her. "Okay. You're right. No matter how convoluted the chain of events leading to that man in the golf cart, it obviously began with something Moon Child did. But what can we do? How do we stop her?"

Hau shook his head. "We have to catch up to her and… I don't know, tie her up or something. Maybe put duct tape on her mouth so she can't give commands to her Pokémon anymore."

It wasn't precisely a good idea, but it was a better idea than General H. G. Peckerham's, which was to completely annihilate Melemele Island with a series of airstrikes, and it was _much_ better than Dwayne's idea to replace his missing prosthetic hand and forearm with an identical prosthetic hand and forearm. Dwayne should have known better than to defy Moon Child's will so brazenly.

"You're as good as new, Dwayne," Dr. Matthews said, manually curling the wooden fingers at the end of Dwayne's replacement arm. Dwayne had gone straight from the scene at the Ruins of Life to Heahea's public hospital and commissioned a replacement arm from Dr. Eugene Matthews, a tall, ancient being with a wild wiry shock of black hair and thick Coke-bottle eyeglasses. An hour after Dwayne checked in, his new arm was fully installed and ready for action.

"Thanks, yo," Dwayne said earnestly, and shook with Dr. Matthews using his organic hand. "That kid cut me to the _bone,_ dawg!"

"Well, 'dawg,' I'm sorry to hear that. Have you considered filing a police report?"

"No cops!" Dwayne screamed. "What do you think I am, homie? A numbskull?" He shoved Dr. Matthews against the wall and then took the elevator down to the lobby and left the hospital. As soon as Dwayne stepped out onto the street, Moon Child swooped by on Charizard and ripped his arm off again.

"Nooo!" Dwayne howled, staring in miserable disbelief at the stump of his new wooden arm. It had been amputated at the elbow again, just like last time. He looked up into the sky to watch the departing Charizard and witnessed Moon Child throw the arm once more over the cliff onto the rocks lining the beach where his previous wooden arm now lay.

"This is a dream," Dwayne said. His voice broke and a hot tear ran down the side of his nose to disappear into his Team Skull bandana. "There ain't no way this is really happening to me. This is just a bad dream, yo."

Just then, Lt. Surge came around the corner in his golf cart, screaming and bouncing up and down on the seat in a frenzy of terror over the possibility of Mina looking at his dong. Surge threw a battery as hard as he could at Dwayne. The battery hit Dwayne in the head and knocked him out. He fell limp against the door of the hospital, slid to the ground, and began to have a bad dream about Moon Child stealing a third prosthetic arm from him.


	9. Chapter 9

**9**

 _Preposterous Accusations On Melemele... Moon Child's Mother Takes the Stand... Lovebirds Made Airborne_

* * *

The day after Professor Kukui found out that Rattata was not qualified to be the guardian deity of Melemele Island, Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny were sent before the island tribunal to have their fates decided. First, character witnesses were called to explain to the councilmen exactly who it was they were dealing with.

"Something is wrong with the policewoman, too," Professor Kukui declared from the stand. Officer Jenny, who had ingested 800 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide shortly before the trial, gave him a dreamy smile and a wink. All around them the storm and its purple tornados raged. Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny were held in a raised bamboo cage where they could be seen by the councilmen and the judge. The judge was Hala, the Melemele Kahuna.

"What do you mean, 'wrong'?" Hala asked.

"There's just something wrong about her. I don't think she's really a police officer, for one thing," Kukui said, glaring at Officer Jenny. "She and the boy are always giving each other mischievous looks, and they _both_ act like everything is hilarious, even when it clearly isn't. I think they might be using… _marijuana_."

"That's preposterous!" Youngster Joey screamed, and shook the bamboo struts forming the bars of the cage. Officer Jenny found great hilarity in his use of the word 'preposterous' and began to giggle into her knees.

"Preposterous my butt, young cousin," Professor Kukui said. He thrust his index finger at the defendants. "I know reefer madness when I see it. The both of you's are addicted!"

"That's enough, Professor," Hala said wearily. Professor Kukui got up and went back to where the other witnesses were congregated. Moon Child's mother was called to the stand next.

"I don't know about reefer madness, but it's true that Youngster Joey did nominate that lackluster Rattata to be the new guardian deity." Moon Child's mother wiped a tear from her cheek. "We had such hope that all could be made right again. Such trust. And look what we got. A Level 8 Rattata!"

"Rattata is the greatest man I've ever known," Youngster Joey yelled.

"He even _called_ me," Moon Child's mother said weepily. "At 11 P.M. I was already in bed. I got up to answer the phone, thinking maybe it was Moon Child, calling to apologize for all this craziness. But it was Youngster Joey. He wasn't making any sense. I don't know how he got my number. All I could make out was 'Rattata this' and 'Rattata that.' I didn't fall back asleep the whole rest of the night. I was afraid he was going to spring out of the closet with another update on Rattata, or appear at my window."

Officer Jenny looked up from her knees with wild, dilated pupils that twitched from Moon Child's mother to Hala to Youngster Joey beside her. She had not known he possessed the power to appear in closets and at windows.

"Silence," Hala thundered. He sent Moon Child's mother away and called to the stand a representative of Alolan Bell, the phone company through which Youngster Joey had cell phone service.

"His overages are utterly goddamn ridiculous," the tidy little man explained, lighting a cigarette. "To be honest, I'm embarrassed for him. He could save hundreds of dollars a month if he'd sign up for a package that includes unlimited nights and weekends. All day and night, this little dude is calling people and using data. Last month he used _179_ _gigabytes_ of data. That's bigger than my tablet's entire hard drive. And I don't know if it's legal for me to tell you this, but most of that data went toward Google searches for pictures of Rattatas."

"You shut your lying mouth!" Youngster Joey screamed.

"Who even knows where his parents are, or why they don't do something about his absurd bill. His account is thirty-seven months past due. And who even _knows_ what possesses us to keep said account open for him."

"My mom is stuck between the refrigerator and the sink, back in Johto," Youngster Joey cried. It seemed like everyone was ganging up on him about things he couldn't control, such as Rattata's Level and his mother's unfortunate condition of being trapped in the kitchen.

The Alolan Bell representative puffed on his cigarette for a minute, contemplating. "Maybe it isn't my place," he said, "seeing as how I have no relation to the defendants. But I believe they should be launched into the sea with a catapult. The kid and the policewoman both. It's said that it takes a village to raise a child, right? Well, hell, I'm part of a village—a phone company, I mean, but a company could be described as a form of village. Basically, what I'm saying is that if anyone gets to fire the catapult, I think it had ought to be me. I've always wanted to cut a catapult's rope with a machete and feel the pride of knowing I had sent something flying up into the sky."

"We're going to the sky!" Officer Jenny cried happily.

Hala nodded seriously. "The catapult idea resonates with me," he admitted.

"You people are all out of your minds," Youngster Joey murmured in disbelief. He had always felt like he was the weirdest one in the room, no matter which room he was in, but today he had learned an important lesson about underestimating the weirdness of others.

The catapult was built despite the raging storm and continuing evacuation effort. The people of Melemele constructed it from palm trunks and whatever else they had lying around. When the catapult was complete, it was towed to the beach and Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny, still inside their bamboo cage, were loaded into the bucket.

"Rattata will get you for this," Youngster Joey promised in a voice bright with vengeance. "A curse upon this place. A pox upon your houses, every last one! Let Melemele Island be completely destroyed! Let it sink into the sea!"

Thunder cracked overhead, and a purple tornado dancing a few miles beyond the shore suddenly sucked a Lapras up into the sky. The Lapras made a loud, mewing cry that seemed to serve as an ominous punctuation mark for Joey's words. The people of Melemele who had gathered to watch the launch looked at one another uneasily. Most of them _did_ believe in the potency of curses.

Officer Jenny, whose system was finally seeing a bit of success in pushing back the recent LSD invasion, looked around at what was going on. "Why are we in a catapult?" she asked innocently.

"Rattata will ruin you all," Youngster Joey roared. The day's fading light painted his face in terrible violet slashes of shadow. His wet t-shirt hung from his skinny shoulders like a battle standard. The people were suddenly very much afraid.

"Fore!" cried the Alolan Bell man. He swung his machete and severed the rope holding the catapult's cup, and _WHOOM,_ the machine launched Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny into the air. Before long they were specks, and then the specks landed in the ocean with an audible splash.

The catapulting saved their lives, as it turned out. The cage broke upon hitting the surface of the water, and they easily swam to one of the leaving evacuation boats headed for Akala. The boat was happy to pick them up. And an hour later, Youngster Joey's curse came true in the form of General H. G. Peckerham's Charizard bomb raid, which razed Melemele with colossal thudding blooms of red and white light and choking black smoke and flying clods of rock and earth that returned the island to a primeval wasteland that could support no living thing ever again.


	10. Chapter 10

**10**

 _Fear and Loathing Aboard the Evacuation Boat... Good Guys Versus Bad Guys... A New Alliance?_

* * *

When the last Alolan Air Force Charizard turned off from the infernal scramble of destruction that was now Melemele Island and rejoined formation, the only surviving members of R.A.T.T.A.T.A. were Lillie, Hau, Mina, Youngster Joey, Officer Jenny, and Rattata, who had withstood the air raid with one hit point to spare thanks to his handy Focus Sash. And Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny had vengefully chosen to switch sides and team up with Moon Child, so R.A.T.T.A.T.A. had relatively little to work with.

"Those foot sucking butt blisters," Youngster Joey had complained from the deck of the evacuee ship he and Officer Jenny had boarded after being expelled by catapult from Melemele. "Those scab licker, ass cruncher, cricket dicked _turd_ nuggets."

"Chill," said Officer Jenny.

"Those _penis wrinkles_!" he screamed. " _No_ one shoots Youngster Joey out of a catapult!"

"You should switch your phone service from Alolan Bell to something else," Jenny suggested. "It would be the perfect revenge."

Youngster Joey shook his head. He took off his cap and wiggled his fingertips under the band to see if any of his acid blotter squares had survived the swim. None had. "I have a better revenge idea," he told her, scowling. "Let's help Moon Child steal the guardian deities and screw up Alola bad as hell."

Jenny gasped aloud. Around them on the ship's deck, peering over the rail or distributing supplies amongst themselves, were groups of evacuees from Melemele.

"Become _bad guys_?" she whispered behind one cupped hand.

"Why not?" Joey said. "I'm already an official member of Team Rocket."

"But I'm a police officer! I'd have to arrest us!"

But Youngster Joey was too mentally swift for that. "Don't arrest us until after we commit our crimes," he said. "If we do it right, there won't be any police departments to call, or jails to put us in."

"It doesn't work like that," Officer Jenny insisted. "It's something in the blood. I didn't choose this life. I was _born_ this way. Remember? How you found me at that rest stop, being shoved around by Ace Trainers? How you electrocuted that one in the nuts with the Taser?"

Joey did remember. He'd been riding with a different Officer Jenny on a motorcycle when they'd stopped to take a piss. Inside the rest stop he had discovered an act of bullying in progress and decided to rescue Lass Jenny—who had been recently kicked out of her house by her bad guy parents after they realized that their daughter was, through some poorly understood natural process, a budding Officer Jenny.

"I _can't_ just not arrest us if we become bad guys," she told him.

"But what about all the bad guy activities we already do? Like acid, for instance?"

"Swallowing acid is a good guy activity," Officer Jenny thundered. Youngster Joey had touched a particularly sore spot in her philosophy. Her cyan locks shook with fury underneath her police cap.

"Well, so is helping our friend Moon Child on her righteous quest to steal the guardian deities."

"Maybe you're right," Officer Jenny decided. "After all, it was a definite bad guy move to shoot us out of a catapult. Maybe anything we did to pay those braindead hillbillies back would automatically be a good guy move."

"Now you're thinking like a good guy," Youngster Joey said proudly. He spun his cap around backward and grinned. "To protect the world from devastation!"

Officer Jenny's eyes grew large. "To unite all peoples within our nation," she said.

"To denounce the evils of catapulting children."

"To extend our reach to the stars above!" Jenny shrieked. She and Youngster Joey struck cool poses and cried out:

"Youngster Joey!"

"Officer Jenny!"

"Be quiet, you stupid kids!" screamed a fisherman whose fishing empire had been brought crashing down first by Moon Child's interference with Tapu Koko and then Rattata's lack of interference with the resultant purple tornados. He was in a terrible mood, would be for the foreseeable future, and had no patience for enthusiastic youngsters like Youngster Joey or Officer Jenny.

"You wanna go downtown?" Officer Jenny shouted. She pulled a pair of handcuffs off her belt and dangled them threateningly.

"Just ignore him," Youngster Joey said, pulling Officer Jenny to a more secluded section of the deck. "Our first good guy move will be to contact Moon Child and tell her about how we're bad guys now." They went to one of the boat's pay phones. Youngster Joey's cell phone, tragically, had been destroyed in the bath they'd taken after the catapulting.

"Hello?" said Moon Child. She was soaring over the ocean on the back of Charizard, headed for Ula'ula Island.

"Hi, Moon Child! It's me, Youngster Joey!" cried Youngster Joey. As soon as he got a phone in his hand, his self-control went straight out the window. It was all he could do to keep himself from screaming various Rattata facts into the receiver. "Did you hear that Rattata recently became a deity?!"

Moon Child pressed one hand against her phone's mouthpiece and rolled her eyes deep into her head. "Ohmyfuggingod," she moaned. "It's Youngster Joey."

"No, Joey," she then told him. "I didn't hear that."

"Well, it's true! And the people of Melemele were so unhappy with his performance that they shot me and Jenny out of a catapult and turned us into bad guys. We're on your team now!"

Moon Child didn't know what to say.

"Where are you headed next? Ula'ula, and Tapu Bulu?"

"As a matter of fact," Moon Child said, "that's right."

"Great! We'll meet you over there!"

Youngster Joey and Moon Child hung up. Moon Child immediately began running through her stable of excuses not to hang out with people and selected several good ones to use on Youngster Joey if and when she actually did run into him and his crazy acid head girlfriend.


	11. Chapter 11

**11**

 _A Haunted Apartment... Mina Scores Two Points... The Demise of Clarence J. Fork_

* * *

Akala Island was not off the hook yet. Not only was the catastrophic combo of Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny en route to the port city of Heahea, but Lt. Surge/Clarence J. Fork had, for a full day and night, led pretty Mina on a low-speed chase through the island's various locales. Nothing could stop the chase. The local police had set up spike strips, but the golf carts did not have air tires—only rough plastic wheels that crunched over gravel and broken glass and nails without complaint. Even worse, Clarence J. Fork's cart was still trailing the old man's walker from one of its back wheels, and the spike strip had become tangled in the walker as he passed over it. The spike strip soon began to catch other things, and pretty soon Clarence J. Fork's golf cart had a swishing mechanical tail that had grown to an absurd length of twenty-five feet. Then there came a point where Mina lost track of him somewhere in the bustling downtown district, so she had taken the opportunity to visit one of her friends who sold marijuana out of a local apartment. The two girls got ridiculously high, became terrified that the apartment might be haunted, and ran screaming from the building. The screaming was horribly disturbing to the various Akalans who had gone mad thanks to Tapu Lele's capture. A man on the sidewalk began to scream along with them, and then a trio of old women joined him and started shrieking as well. Soon hundreds of people across the city were screaming in chorus.

"Aaaaaahhhhh," screamed a Nurse Joy, running naked through the street with a pen clenched in one fist like a dagger. Her magnificent breasts sloshed about her bare chest.

"Nooooo!" howled an office worker who had gone on lunch at exactly the wrong time.

"Oh my goooooooddd," a hiker bellowed. He fell to the ground and began to thrash.

"Aaaaaaaaaggghghhghgh," a little boy gurgled.

"Ghoooosts," Mina screamed.

"Aaaaahhhh," Nurse Joy confirmed, stabbing at the air wildly with her pen.

"Eeeeeek!" screamed an old woman. She could not bear the sight of the nude female body.

"Ohhhhhh," moaned an old man who had seen the old woman screaming.

"Ooooohhhhhhh," someone else added helpfully.

"Aahhhhhhhh," Nurse Joy cried.

"Shiiiiiit, Raichu! Dere she is again!" Clarence J. Fork announced as he came back down the street in the other direction and saw Mina. Mina also saw him, and screamed aloud. She dodged the swinging tail of items his golf cart had accumulated, climbed back into her cart, and resumed the chase. From Heahea, Clarence J. Fork led them along Route 4 toward Paniola Town and the famed Paniola Sex Ranch, where breeders across Alola flock to have their Pokémon titillated by the staff and goaded into bizarre cross-species reproduction rituals. The staff of the Sex Ranch had gone crazy and had loaded two Metapods into a tiny cage with an Electabuzz, hoping to spark an amorous three-way encounter that would produce God knows what. Clarence J. Fork banged his mechanical tail against the Ranch's power line and cut power to the whole installation. At once, the Pokémon were plunged into darkness and their handlers went into convulsions of crazed, superstitious fear.

"Metapod," one of the Metapods cried in an odd voice.

Mina nearly cut off Clarence J. Fork at a bend in the road, but her cart skidded in the mud at the last second and he got away again. From Paniola Ranch they rocketed along perilous volcanic ridges up toward Royal Avenue, where cruel Battle Royals, in which any of the four participating Pokémon can be killed at any time by any of the three others, were staged by vicious underground gambling addicts. Clarence J. Fork rambled inside, took his cart up the escalator, and entered the Battle Royal dome.

"Oh sweet merciless Jesus," cried the announcer's booming voice over the speakers, "what's this? Could it _be_? Ladies and gentlemen, it's _Lt. Surge with a_ _steel chair_!"

The chugging metal guitars of Lt. Surge's theme song began to blast triumphantly throughout the stadium as his cart sailed over the ropes and into the ring, where it landed on and fatally crushed a battling Venomoth. The old man's smashed-up walker caught the Venomoth's corpse and added it to the swinging tail.

"No!" screamed Koga, whose Venomoth it had been. His face crumpled in ripping psychic pain and he clutched at his mouth with both hands. "I've had that Venomoth since I was two years old! Why! Why, God, _why_?"

Lt. Surge exited the arena, and Mina came in. The song switched from Surge's Theme to Mina's Theme, which was some kind of surf-inspired 90's noise pop wall-of-sound thing with hazy female vocals way down in the mix. The crowd erupted. Mina's cart bounced up into the ring and smashed a Machoke to death.

" _Machoooke_ ," bellowed its trainer as he fell to his meaty knees and began to sob.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the announcer's voice, sounding sweaty and feverish, "we've never seen anything like this. The carnage! The flying blood and bones! Captain Mina has _just_ _won the Battle Royal_!" The bell dinged and the crowd exploded as Mina zoomed down the ramp and exited the arena. On her way out, the attendant awarded her 2 BP.

From that awful scene they raced into Wela Volcano Park and did an absurd amount of damage to the various endangered plants which can only grow in Wela by carelessly taking the chase off-road. Surge's tail was now an unbelievable sixty feet long, and its added weight had slowed his cart to a crawl. Mina pulled over and watched in morbid awe as Surge tried desperately to navigate a sheer cliff face that overlooked the park's active volcano. The tail tumbled over the side, into the lava. Lt. Surge howled in fear. His cart wobbled precariously, slid back, jetted forward, drifted to the side, and rode a crumbling avalanche of brittle rock down into the mouth of the volcano. He perished instantly. Mina drove back to Heahea City feeling as though she were trapped in some kind of hellish nightmare world where nothing made even a polite amount of sense.

Akala Island was ruined. The chase had soured the entire world on Akalan tourism for decades to come, and the numerous people who had begun to scream when Mina and her friend saw the imaginary ghosts were never quite the same again. The Nurse Joy who had gone streaking, especially. She was transferred to a distant Pokémon Center in Hoenn and erased from the memory of Heahea. Her family became pariahs and were eventually driven into the Wela wilderness, where they remained, subsisting on uncooked roughage and speaking in tongues for the rest of their strange lives.


	12. Chapter 12

**12**

 _Worst Case Scenario Realized... One-Armed Blues On the Beach... The Observatory In the Morning_

* * *

And the worst thing was that H. G. Peckerham's pecker was still scalded. When he and his fleet of Charizard bombers returned to base and removed their helmets and climbed down and got to patting one another on the back for a job well done, he was astounded to find that destroying Melemele may not have fixed the problem at all. His brow furrowed in horror and disbelief. The first impression—as he shifted his weight around and paid careful attention to the sensations emanating from his groin—was that _the penis still hurt._

He dashed inside and retired to his quarters, having decided to take the next round of pictures of the affected skin right away. It hadn't been quite an hour since his last batch, but he was curious to see if his plan had worked.

"Redness!" H. G. Peckerham exclaimed, holding his unzipped zipper in one hand and his camera in the other. "This cannot be!"

"Men," he announced fifteen minutes later in the briefing room, "the worst case scenario has come to pass." He paused to hand a stack of Polaroids depicting his lightly scaled penis and thigh area to the bombardiers seated in the front row. Many of them were still wearing their flak jackets, and a few men had the beefy intercom headphones they used to stay in communication slung casually around their necks. As the men began to pass the photos around and stare in awe at the scaled penis, H. G. Peckerham stood proudly at the front of the room with his hands clasped behind his back and his chin thrust forward. They were good men. Not a single one of them was able to behold the penis without the same look of shock and revulsion crossing his features that had crossed H. G. Peckerham's fifteen minutes ago when he had first discovered that his penis was still scalded.

"Sir, what went wrong?" cried one of the bombardiers. "Did we fail to destroy part of the island? I don't understand!"

"I'll be damned if I know, either, soldier," H. G. Peckerham replied paternally. "As far as I could tell, Melemele was utterly demolished. The bomb pattern was nice and tight. I saw no targets left standing. The Pokémon Center was so much ash and rubble. Same with the Poké Mart. I'm as perplexed as you boys."

"Should we do Akala next?" the bombardier asked. A few of the men seated near him made sounds of eager approval, and someone clapped him heartily on the shoulder. The bombardier turned to the man with a smile and clapped his friend's arm right back.

"We clearly have no choice," Peckerham agreed. "Not only is the topical reddening still apparent, despite the double application of Vaseline, but there appears to be a blister developing on the thigh. Do you see?"

"Plain as day, sir."

H. G. Peckerham strode back and forth across the front of the room, stabbing his index finger at the men to emphasize his point. "Then you _must_ see why we cannot rest. We're all that stands between my penis and annihilation, boys. Write your letters and call your wives. Tomorrow we head for Akala."

Raucous cheers shook the small briefing room. H. G. Peckerham had to suppress a smile. He had never been prouder to belong to the Alolan Air Force, and he had never been more proud of his men.

Meanwhile, Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny's evacuation boat was pulling into the Heahea harbor. They navigated the ramp along with the other evacuees and then went directly across the harbor to board a different boat that was going to Ula'ula, where Moon Child was waiting for their assistance. Mina escaped from Peckerham, too. She Charizarded up, took to the sky, and was a hundred miles away when the explosions on Akala started. Even Dwayne survived; the only sections of the island which were not bombed were the rocky beach where Moon Child had put Dwayne's wooden arms and the Wela Volcano Park, to which Nurse Joy's family had been exiled. Dwayne happened to be down on the beach hunting for arms when the first bomb blasts cut through the day.

"What the hell?" Dwayne screamed, clutching the wooden hand of one of his wooden arms in his organic hand. He stared in amazement as nightmare dragons swooped over and through one another and rained bombs down. Charizards filled the sky.

"This island sucks, dawg," Dwayne said, clutching the arm to his chest. He scurried into a nearby beach cave to wait out the destruction. "I don't deserve this. Don't deserve _none_ of this shit. I should be in Po Town right now, drinking a tall glass of milk with Spinda! Bump this, yo! Bump _all_ this!"

"Friend, I think I muzzzzt caution you not to catch any more guardian deities!" Rotom told Moon Child the next day as they came in for a landing at the observatory on Mount Hokulani.

"Wat!" said Moon Child. "You must be crazy, Rotom. Catching these is hilarious."

Rotom buzzed angrily and changed the cracked screen displaying the picture of his face smiling to one of his face frowning. "It izzzzn't hilarious at all, buddy! I'm reading the headlines and it says here a lot of bad things have happened to Melemele and Akala since you took their deities and put them in your PC. Things that you caused!"

Moon Child considered this for a moment and scratched the back of her head. "What kinds of things?" she asked.

"It says a man witnesses identified as Lt. Surge stole a golf cart in Heahea, and that there was a screaming epidemic."

Moon Child laughed.

"It's not funny!" Rotom insisted. "This Pokémon adventure you're on is starting to get really serious!"

Moon Child looked around. It didn't feel serious at all. The observatory was awash in morning sunlight, and the sky above the island was a hazy blue-pink dream. From this altitude she could see for miles in every direction, could see the very curve of the Earth. She wasn't hungry or thirsty or tired or lonely. She was having a blast, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that Tapu Koko and Tapu Lele were having similar blasts inside her PC with all the other friends she had collected over the last several months. Who cared if her fun adventure made some stupid grownups scream?

"Get back in the bag, Rotom!" Moon Child yelled.


	13. Chapter 13

**13**

 _Crazy Molayne Bamboozled Into Giving Directions... Officer Jenny Follows Her Nose... All Aboard the Desert Bus_

* * *

Things only started to get serious for Moon Child when a computer nerd named Molayne came galloping out of the Observatory at her on crazily long, thin legs, swatting at the air and screaming curses like a lunatic scarecrow.

"Ass," Molayne roared at Moon Child. The foam of pure rage flecked his lips and chin. He stopped a few feet from Moon Child and gave his own hair a frustrated pull. "Bitch, dick! Shit! Bitch," Molayne said.

"What's your problem, Dweebo?" Moon Child asked. She put Rotom protectively back in her bag just in case this strange guy decided he wanted an ass-kicking right here in front of the Observatory.

"Go away!" Molayne shrieked. "Soffy and I never should have given you that Z-Crystal, _cock_!" His head and shoulder jumped involuntarily. "Dick, shit, dick!"

"Why not? Who are you?"

"You don't even _remember_ me?" Molayne cried. Molayne was wearing a thick pair of prescription dork glasses, and Moon Child noticed that one of the lenses was even more cracked than Rotom. "Soffy and I are Captains!" Molayne yelled at her. "You passed our trial, and we powered you up. Cock! And then what do you do? Steal _deities_!" Molayne shuddered and slapped at one of his legs for a moment. He looked like he was fighting a swarm of invisible bees. Moon Child felt sorry for Molayne. He had clearly been up all night doing weird things. She decided she wouldn't hurt him—as long as he gave her directions.

"Say, which way to the Ruins of Abundance?" she asked.

"What!? _Piss_! So you can go steal Tapu Bulu, too?"

"Not at all! Of _course_ not. I only want to _talk_ to him."

"About what," Molayne demanded. One of his eyelids was twitching wildly.

"All _kinds_ of important stuff. Nvidia versus AMD, good deals on Steam, emulating Windows on OS X—"

Molvayne had begun to whine and clutch at his neck and sway back and forth while Moon Child talked. "No!" he screamed. " _Dick_! You're trying to fool me! You don't care about any of that stuff!"

"—and I _especially_ want to ask him about Linux. I have a lot of Linux questions."

Molvayne threw his head back and howled into the sky. He knew he was beaten.

"East of Tapu Village," he said. "Through the desert. Shit. Oh, _ass_. You little monster! Don't ever come back here."

"Thanks, mister!" Moon Child called brightly as she got back on Charizard and lifted off. "By the way, Linux sucks!"

Molayne's dwindling scream of rage was music to Moon Child's ears as she sailed down the mountain on a curtain of breeze and mellow morning sunlight.

Youngster Joey was having a lot of fun, too. He and Officer Jenny both. They'd fully embraced their new destinies as agents of chaos in the service of the dark lord Moon Child, and they had hatched all sorts of wacky plans to help her out on the ride over to Ula'ula. They also got deep into Jenny's emergency stash of mescaline. By the time the boat docked and they were running down the ramp, pushing people out of the way and convulsing with mischievous laughter, their pupils looked like the mouths of caves and they were both drenched in sweat and ectoplasm.

"She's that way!" Officer Jenny screamed happily. "Oh, I can smell her! I can smell her thoughts right now!"

"I can smell her too," Youngster Joey announced. People moved around the psychedelic lovebirds in wide, cautious arcs. A moat had encircled them. Their obvious strangeness was isolating, and it made Youngster Joey very nervous. The last thing he wanted was a bunch of cops crawling up his butt.

"We have to go to her right now, this very second, without an instant's hesitation," he told Jenny very seriously and dragged her by the elbow through the crowd toward the bus stop. "I've just sent two messages to Moon Child, and got one in response," he went on. "Telepathically, I mean."

"What was the first message?"

"I asked her if we were indeed smelling her thoughts—"

"Stupid question," Officer Jenny pointed out, "because I _know_ I was."

"And you were right. She has replied that the thoughts were, in fact, hers. Unless—" Here a realization came over Youngster Joey that turned his muscles to rigid fibrous frozen slabs and speared his brainstem with a bolt of pure paranoia. "—Unless the person who replied _wasn't Moon Child at all_ —"

Officer Jenny screamed. They got on the bus along with a group of about five other people.

"Awwwwll aboard the Desert Bus," the bus driver roared into the PA system. "This bus is heading for the desert."

Youngster Joey sucked in breath. He'd had a scary time in a desert on mescaline once. He'd had to eat his way through a Snorlax that had blocked his path, and then someone had put him in jail with a bunch of truculent Cue Balls who had started an argument about literature which ended in a brawl that left three of their number dead and six more horribly maimed.

"Relax," Officer Jenny told him.

"I can't relax!"

"You have to. For the good of the nation. I mean—" she corrected herself, "—for the good of _Moon Child_. For the _bad_ of the nation."

Youngster Joey slowly pressed himself into the seat and began to relax.

"Desert Bus don't stop for eight hours," the bus driver said. "No pause. No breaks. No nothin'. Just desert and bus until we get there."

The doors slammed shut, and the bus rumbled off down the highway into whipping sheets of sand and grit.


	14. Chapter 14

**14**

 _Attack of the Loud Hiker... Kicked Off the Bus... The Spirit Guides Set Out_

* * *

Moon Child had been quite intent on not hanging out with Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny before she realized what a problem the desert surrounding the Ruins of Abundance was going to be.

At first she had simply charged in on Tauros, blasting through the dunes at ninety miles an hour, trampling wild Pokémon and scaring people who were hiking around or trying to study the flora and fauna of the region. But before too long, she realized that she kept seeing the same stack of four round rocks and the same blonde hiker picking his teeth with a cactus needle. No matter which way she made Tauros run, she kept returning to these two landmarks. It was like the desert was warping around itself to keep her in one spot.

"What the dick," she complained.

"You need a spirit guide, little girl!" the blonde hiker shouted. His voice was ridiculously loud—inappropriate even for an outdoor area such as a windy desert. Moon Child clamped her hands over her ears.

"Yep!" the hiker bellowed. "A spirit guide! That's what you need!"

"I got it," Moon Child told him.

"Reckon you can't get through here at all without a _spirit guide_!"

"Be quiet," Moon Child ordered.

"Desert's too tough to navigate without someone who can listen to the whispers of the earth!"

"Shut up!"

The hiker advanced on Moon Child, jovially picking at a canine tooth and speaking louder still. "Did you know that?" he asked.

"You idiot!" Moon Child screamed. "Yes, I know it!"

"That's why you need a spirit guide!" Spittle flew from the hiker's mouth and hit Moon Child on the collarbone. She heeled Tauros around and charged away from the hiker. But less than a minute later, there he was again, in front of her, next to the pile of four stones.

"Hi again, little girl!" he roared, waving with both hands. "Hey, did you find a spirit guide yet?"

"You mother fucker," Moon Child cried in despair.

"Listen!" the hiker yelled. "I'm telling you: _spirit guide_! That's what you need, for sure!"

"I'm going to kill you," Moon Child said.

"What?" the hiker's voice blasted.

"I'm going to murder you in the desert," Moon Child told him.

"I couldn't hear you!" the hiker yelled friendlily.

"You're dead," Moon Child said. "You're finished."

"Hey," the hiker pointed out, "you should think about finding a _spirit guide_!"

Moon Child bit her heels into Tauros' sides and the Pokémon charged forward with a brutal roar. The hiker's eyes widened and he dove out of the way. Moon Child's Tauros missed him by mere inches.

"That's not the way to find a spirit guide!" the hiker yelled. Moon Child circled back around and came at him again.

"Hey, cut it out!" the hiker's incredible voice cried. "That's dangerous!"

"Hya!" Moon Child shrieked victoriously as she came back around. One of Tauros' horns hooked the hiker under an arm and spun him into the air.

"Whoa there!" he shouted. "Ouch!"

Moon Child charged off, back toward Tapu Village. "If I come back and see you again, you're getting trampled," she warned the hiker.

"You should bring a _spirit guide_ when you come back!" the hiker shouted to her, waving goodbye.

Moon Child decided that, even though she hated the loud hiker with every fiber of her being, he was correct about spirit guides, and that she wanted to hang out with him again even less than she wanted to hang out with Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny, who both happened to be renowned for their ability to navigate the spirit realm.

"She just thought about us, and how much she wants to see us!" Officer Jenny exclaimed happily, still aboard the Desert Bus. "I smelled it!" She planted both boots against the back of the seat in front of them and kicked merrily. The old woman sitting in the seat spun around with murderous rage in her eyes.

"Stop it!" she screamed. "This bus ride is awful enough without you kicking the seat every ten seconds!"

"You wanna go downtown?" Jenny asked.

"I'll get you thrown off the bus! I don't care if you _are_ a police officer!"

"Police officer?!" Youngster Joey cried, suddenly finding himself whipped into a paranoid frenzy. Then he realized the old woman was just talking about Officer Jenny, and he relaxed again. Jenny had fallen into a habit of kicking the seat each time she had a new thought, and with the amount of psychedelic drugs she had eaten in the past ten hours or so, the thoughts were coming fast and furious. She and Youngster Joey had already been ejected from several different seats by angry passengers, and it looked like the old woman might exile them again, to yet another part of the bus.

"Jenny, _shhhhhh,_ " Youngster Joey pleaded. "Make your legs be quiet and stop kicking."

"No can do, _mi amour,_ " she told him apologetically, and rammed her heels into the seat again. "They're sovereign legs now. I lost any influence I had over their warlike nature almost an hour ago."

"Stop it!" the old woman screamed again, and whipped her purse over the back of the seat at Officer Jenny. The purse flapped in her face, spilling old lady things all over the place. Purple lipstick, a bleary clamshell mirror, and a packet of tissues rained down into Jenny's lap.

"Quit kicking, quit yelling, and quit fighting," the bus driver suddenly ordered everyone over the PA system. "If I hear one more kick or yell, I'm gonna throw everyone out into the desert. Even myself."

Jenny kicked the seat and loosed a victory yell.

Ten minutes later, after the bus driver had finished bodily hurling each and every one of the passengers out the door and into the sand, he took a running leap himself and joined them in the heap. "Ouuugh," he moaned.

"You fools! You got us all kicked out!" the old woman yelled.

"Moon Child! She's near!" Youngster Joey suddenly realized. His eyeballs flicked nervously around before settling in an eastward direction. "Over there!"

Officer Jenny crawled out from underneath the old woman. She was sweating furiously. "You're right! She's in need of us! Her spirit guides!"

"That's what I kept telling her," the blonde hiker yelled. The place the bus driver had stopped to throw everyone out happened to be within the endless loop where the hiker had spoken so loudly to Moon Child. "She needs _spirit guides_!"

Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny started happily off for Tapu Village, grateful for this newest objective.


	15. Chapter 15

**15**

 _Strange Landmarks in the Desert... Lillie and Mina on the Fate of Alola... A Torrent of Vomit_

* * *

The ruined shapes of Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny emerged from the horizon through veils of whipping sand like frayed and ancient ghosts yawning themselves up from the pits of hell. Moon Child watched their approach from atop her mount's mighty shoulders with a frown on her face. Joey and Jenny had only been wandering the wastes for about twenty minutes since having gotten kicked off the bus, but they both already looked like fugitives from some Martian gulag. Sand and clay caked their faces and hung in tangled clumps from their hair. Their movement was ghoulish. Jenny had her police revolver drawn and was aiming it down between her feet, prepared for any challenger.

"She can shoot the arms off a cactus a mile out," Youngster Joey warned.

Moon Child looked at him. She spat sidelong into the dust. "I know it," she said.

They rode triple aback Tauros heading in the direction of the loud hiker, and after a while Youngster Joey managed to convince Moon Child that spirit guides are no good unless the guides are on the same wavelength as the guided. In other words, she was going to have to chow down on some mescaline before they could get moving.

"It looks like a butt," Moon Child said of the picture of a peyote cactus button Youngster Joey googled up in Rotom's browser app. "It looks like somebody's green butt. What does it feel like? I'm not too sure about this."

"Woo!" Officer Jenny cried from the back of the line, squeezing Youngster Joey more closely to herself. "It feels," she said with authoritative grandeur, "like there's a bird inside your head."

"Is that a good thing?"

"Wonderful!" Jenny cried.

"Well," Moon Child said thoughtfully… and then shook her head. "Listen, I smoked weed a few times with the Super Nerds at recess back in Kanto, and even that was a little too nutzo for me. You guys can eat my share. I'll just chill while you navigate the spirit realm."

Youngster Joey found this development disappointing but not unexpected. Not every trainer had a head for mescaline.

"Leyline," Officer Jenny pointed out. Tauros swerved to remain on the path of power.

"Ghost," Youngster Joey said, pointing off to the side.

"Ferris wheel," Officer Jenny said.

"There's a naked guy. Christ, he's naked!" Joey shouted. Moon Child couldn't see any of the landmarks they were navigating from, but she guessed that was all right.

"Sand," Jenny announced.

"Desert oasis," Joey replied. "But that one's not even from the drugs. It's just a mirage."

"Glass cathedral full of elves."

"Kentucky Fried Chicken."

"Giant floating Nintendo 64 logo. Ooo, that's a good one! That one's definitely good luck!"

"Leyline there," Youngster Joey informed Tauros.

"Clown with fangs."

"Alien spacecraft. Or possibly a weather balloon."

"There's a stop sign that says COOL instead of STOP on it."

"Are we there yet?"

"Yes," Youngster Joey screamed, pointing dead ahead into the yawning maw of what did indeed appear to be Tapu Bulu's cave.

"Dang," Moon Child said, hopping down off Tauros and clutching a Poké Ball in each hand. "I can't believe that worked."

Youngster Joey looked into Officer Jenny's dilated pupils. "We're good," he whispered.

Officer Jenny's eyeballs spun in her head like drill bits, or appeared to. "No, Darling," she told Youngster Joey, and caressed the line of his jaw. "We're _bad_."

Meanwhile, Lillie had found Mina in a stoned state almost as severe as that of Joey and Jenny. Lillie and Hau had parted ways for the afternoon and Lillie had flown to Ula'ula where she discovered Mina moping about and shooting baskets while sipping from a thermos of what seemed, at first glance, to be tea.

"Stand back," Mina cautioned as Lillie drew near in her sleek black R.A.T.T.A.T.A. combat uniform. Mina, at the free throw line, tossed the ball into the air and completely over the backboard. She sipped more tea.

"What are you doing?"

"I gave up on stopping Moon Child from ruining the earth," Mina admitted. "Now I'm getting all ripped up on mushrooms. You want a drink?" She offered Lillie the thermos of foul-looking liquid.

"No, thanks."

"Did you give up too?"

Lillie bristled. "I'll never do that."

"Why not?"

The red ball of the sun cast the sky in a thousand tropical colors and drew the two girls' shadows long and dark on the ground behind them. It seemed to Lillie that she was coming to the very end of something.

"I didn't unlock my Z-Powered form… and set Nebby free… only to give up. I didn't come this far just to watch Moon Child destroy the Alolan Islands with her carelessness."

Mina shrugged. "Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. The destruction of Alola. I watched a crazy man drive a golf cart into a volcano today." She took a long sip. "That shit messes with your head."

"My mother hated me and tried to kill me, and my brother too," Lillie shot back. "And I'm still fighting."

Mina looked at the glowering sun and blood streak clouds floating low over the western ocean. "How can we stop her?" she asked finally. "She's too powerful now."

"She's just a girl!" Lillie cried. "Do you know how she got her power? Fighting in the grass! Just doing Flamethrowers over and over again on wild Pokémon! And looking up the best held items on the internet! Mina, we _can_ stop her. Somehow we can save Alola."

Mina turned and shot a free throw. This time she sunk a perfect swish. She caught the ball when it bounced back to her and looked sadly at it in her slender hands. "Alola," she said, "is damned." Then she turned and splattered the court with vomit.

Lillie shook her head and began walking away. She was plagued with unhelpful psychedelic drug abusers. She wondered briefly how Lord Rattata was doing with the purple tornados before remembering that Melemele had been double-destroyed a few days after Tapu Koko's capture by the Air Force and its mystifying bomb raid. What could drive man and beast to such terrible deeds as were now afoot?


	16. Chapter 16

**16**

 _Private Pop Makes Good... The Scalding of the Nipples... Bulu's End_

* * *

For General H. G. Peckerham of the Alolan Air Force, things were beginning to come to a head—no pun intended—concerning the disconcerting matter of his scorched penis. After the successful raid on Akala, he and his troops and their Charizards had flown back to base feeling high on victory. But uncertainty began to cloud his mental horizon as he retired to his quarters to take the next round of penis pictures. To call Peckerham surprised to discover that the penis was still burned even after the completion of the second raid would be like calling the sun a mere flashlight. Peckerham was at a loss for words as he sat on the edge of his military cot with his pants unzipped and his damaged pecker peeking out at him like a rebuke.

Swelling, he thought furiously. Stinging. Inner thigh redness. Blisters increasing.

Still, Peckerham would persevere. He had slogged through his share of dark days in the past. Perhaps the very darkest of all had come in his thirteenth year, when his father had ushered him into manhood by locking him in a cage with his prized Bidoof and then flinging cherry bombs through the bars until Bidoof went for H. G.'s jugular. In the end, the boy had triumphed over the Pokémon—had, in fact, wrenched the life from it with his bare hands—and had been a boy no more. Yes, he thought, wringing his meaty paws together, my dad can take some of the blame for my darkness. But my new enemy Moon Child is certainly responsible for the rest.

Tea, H. G. Peckerham decided. He would settle for tea now that he had officially declared coffee an undrink. Tea and another double application of Vaseline and maybe a few episodes of Wife Swap (his favorite show) would see him off to a restful nap. Peckerham lunged up from the edge of the bed like an old man and trudged through the barracks to the kitchen. He had to walk carefully to avoid bumping his tenderized shlong against his thighs, and he eventually became so tired of this that he simply unzipped and let the shlong swing free. Enlisted men and officers going about their business tried their best not to stare as the General waddled past them with his reddened mini-banana drooping over the top of his zipper.

"Private!" General Peckerham snapped at a man blocking his way to the microwave. The man turned around and had a strange, shocked moment when his brain tried to insist that H. G. Peckerham was not addressing him by rank but rather trying to draw attention to what was flopping out the front of his pants like a limp thumb. The Private clutched at his chest and, with effort, managed to drag his eyes away from the General and move aside.

Peckerham filled a mug with tap water and started the microwave. For a while he watched the mug spin lazy circles on the center of the heating tray. Then he turned around and leaned against the edge of the counter with a sigh. He looked at the Private, who was still looking at him.

"What's your name, son?" Peckerham asked.

"Pop, sir," the Private said.

"What!" Peckerham cried. "Is that your first name or last name?"

"Last, sir," the Private explained. "My first name's Ignatius."

"Ignatius Pop," Peckerham said thoughtfully to himself, as if tasting it. He nodded as the microwave dinged behind him. "A good, strong Alolan name," he said to Private Pop. "I'm promoting you."

"To Major, sir?"

"To General," Peckerham replied at once. "You are to be my new right hand. And I will be _your_ right hand. Or, wait—I'll be the right hand. You be the left."

General Pop didn't know what to say. And he found he had even less to say when General Peckerham opened the microwave, slid his fingers around the handle of the non-microwave-safe mug he had chosen, screamed, fumbled the mug, and spilled boiling water onto his chest, where it scalded both his nipples.

Even before he had stopped screaming and dancing away from the microwave and the goggle-eyed General Pop, General Peckerham decided that Moon Child was going to find out just how dangerous a General with parboiled erogenous zones and a new left hand could be.

While all this was going on, Moon Child was entering Tapu Bulu's cave locked and loaded, with Salazzle in her left hand and Alolan Raichu in her right. She was prepared to deliver a brutal ass-kicking to whatever stood between her and her acquisition of another guardian deity. But before she could hurl Salazzle into Tapu Bulu's face, Tapu Bulu surprised her with a girlish scream.

"No! It—" then he paused. "Wait a minute. You aren't him."

"Who?" Moon Child asked, frozen halfway through her throwing motion.

"The Demon of the Desert," Tapu Bulu said. "The blonde guy who yells all the time."

Moon Child popped her Poké Balls back in her bag with Rotom and tried to get a good look at Tapu Bulu in the gloomy interior of the cave. Tapu Bulu looked like a stocky little lamp, or a foot wearing a sombrero. His body terminated in a short tail that had a bell attached to the end. Moon Child decided right away that she didn't really want this Pokémon for either her team or her PC.

"How'd you get here?" Tapu Bulu wondered. "The Demon has kept all of my worshippers at bay for years uncounted. And his magic is so powerful that even I cannot kill him."

"I have two friends who were tripping balls on mescaline and spirit-guided me," Moon Child said.

Tapu Bulu nodded wisely. "That would explain it," he said, floating and tinkling about. "Did you come to sing my praises?"

"Nah," Moon Child said. "Came to beat the shit out of you and put you in a ball, but… I mean, you can talk and all. It seems kind of weird now."

"Beat and enslave me?!" Tapu Bulu roared, flinging the bell on his tail left and right and producing a series of hellacious warning rings.

"Chill, homie," Moon Child said. "I don't want any talking Pokémon. I'm more of an introvert. It's bad enough that Rotom talks to me all day and night."

Rotom buzzed sorrowfully inside Moon Child's watermelon bag.

"I would never talk to someone like you anyway!" Tapu Bulu cried.

Moon Child laughed. "You're talking to me right now," she said.

Tapu Bulu swished its tail against the wall, ringing the bell with tremendous fury. "For these insults you shall faint, heretic!" he screamed.

"Go, Salazzle!"

Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny, outside, shrieked in panic and dove to the ground just in time to avoid a blast of fire that shot from the mouth of the cave like gamma rays escaping a supernova. The concussion of Salazzle's Flamethrower temporarily deafened Officer Jenny and replaced her hearing with a long, steady hum in which she was able to perceive arguing voices, thanks to the mescaline. Youngster Joey's eyebrows were cooked off his face.

Moon Child came out of the cave a minute later as blackened and sooty as a coal miner. She was holding Tapu Bulu's tail bell. Then she dropped it and crushed it beneath the heel of one of her Chuck Taylors.

"Did everything go well? Did you catch Tapu Bulu?" Youngster Joey asked. Officer Jenny was making sand angels in the dunes a few yards away.

"I sure did," Moon Child said.

"Wow! What was that bell you just stepped on?"

"Just some bell," Moon Child said. "Come on. Let's get back to town."

They collected the newly deaf Officer Jenny and set off aback Tauros, returning roughly the way they'd come. An hour or so later the loud hiker known to Lord Bulu and the ancient Alolans as the Demon of the Desert crept up to the mouth of the cave and admired the long scorch mark Salazzle's Flamethrower had left. He peeked inside. He sniffed. Tapu Bulu's corpse was already drawing flies.

"Victory!" the loud hiker bellowed. His voice was so loud inside the cave that the stone vibrated and somewhere deep in the earth something shifted with a violent thud. "Victory over Bulu at last!"

The Demon of the Desert hurled Tapu Bulu's charred remains out into the desert and began cheerily setting up camp inside his new cave.


	17. Chapter 17

**17**

 _Mina Turns a Corner... A New Plan... Peckerham Takes His Medicine_

* * *

Professor Kukui decided the only thing to do after Moon Child murdered Tapu Bulu was to call another meeting of R.A.T.T.A.T.A. This found the Professor, Lillie, Hau, Mina, and Lord Rattata seated around an outdoor table at a restaurant on Poni Island, which was both Mina's hometown and the last piece of Alolan civilization not yet ruined by Moon Child.

"Horse shit!" Mina screamed. She clawed viciously at the table. Her brain was having a bit of a time transitioning from her Heahean weed coma to yesterday's psilocybin stupor to today's enraged Adderall frenzy. She wasn't normally a big fan of uppers (they made the pot leaves she drew get too spiky and harsh looking), but she had wanted to be awake enough to participate in the Professor's meeting. Naturally she had overshot the dosage, and now her mind was blazing along at about eight hundred thoughts per second, all of which were of an uncharacteristically hawkish nature.

"Calm down, cousin!" Kukui cried as a drop of sweat lashed itself off Mina's bangs and landed in his eye.

" _Appeasement_?" Mina shrieked. "Are you insane?"

"It's the only avenue we got left, ya?" Kukui explained. He tried his best to rub his eye against his shoulder while he talked. "We let Moon Child keep her Tapus and rule over Alola. It's already over for us. This is simply reality, cuz. But we can blockade Poni Island and with Team Flare's help, stand Moon Child off with the threat of mutually assured destruction."

Mina scratched angrily at one armpit and let out a furious huff. As a peaceful psychedelic artist who was basically too sleepy to even do her job as a Captain in all but the most ceremonial sense, she couldn't believe what was about to come out of her mouth until it did: "It didn't stop Hitler and it won't stop Moon Child! We have to crush the snake under our heel before all is lost! Do you understand what the future for Alola is if we let her continue? It will be a size five Converse tennis shoe, stomping on a human face, for all eternity!" She sniffed. "Besides, no one has mentioned Team Flare in years. I wouldn't be surprised if Moon Child put them all in a camp somewhere."

"Mina is acting really weird today but I think she's right," Hau said. He crossed his arms and gazed at the ocean. "After Moon Child is finished ruining Alola, what's stopping her from moving on to her native Kanto? Or Johto? Or what if she gets bored of Pokémon altogether? What if she moves on to Diablo? Are we prepared to deal with a Moon Child decked out in legendary items, casually laying waste to entire dimensions while she watches Netflix?"

Professor Kukui lowered his head and said nothing.

Lillie stared at Mina, who was writhing and gnawing on the lining of her mouth. Mina's position on the Moon Child situation had turned a complete 180 from yesterday, when she had been ready to offer a tepid surrender. Lillie wondered what had gotten into her. Then she remembered: amphetamines.

Even Lord Rattata was on board. He mashed one tiny paw into a fist and pounded it into the palm of his other front paw. "Rattata!" he growled.

"All right, cousins," Kukui said. He looked up from his chest with a lunatic grin on his face. "We'll stop her with the ultimate move!"

"Sit down, you idiot," said a blank-faced G-man to General H. G. Peckerham later that morning, and pushed the General back onto a plush office couch with the palm of one hand. The General looked astounded.

"But we've cornered her on Poni Island! Trapped like a rat! My boys can wipe her out for good!"

The G-men turned their heads slowly toward one another. Perhaps they exchanged a look behind their sunglasses. Then the one who was doing the talking turned his attention back to the emasculated General.

"Regime change is not always a negative thing," the man said mildly. "Tapu Bulu and his worshippers were notoriously difficult for our organization to deal with. Even finding his cave was always a completely fucktangular, multi-day project. The Demon of the Desert regime is already much more transparent and has expressed a willingness to engage in a lucrative quid pro quo arrangement with the Alolan government. Frankly, we've come to understand that Moon Child's aims—namely the subjugation of all Pokémon—align fairly closely with ours."

"What _is_ this absurdity?" General H. G. Peckerham bellowed.

"It's business, General."

"It's cowardice. I won't tolerate cowardice. Moon Child will fall, and my penis will be avenged!"

The G-men exchanged another slow, bland look.

The four of them, two G-men and Generals Peckerham and Pop were currently forty-seven stories up in Kanto's Alolan Embassy. None of them seemed to know exactly what General Pop was doing there, including Pop himself. He stood away from the G-men and Peckerham in a corner as if he had been hired to clean the office and should not be paying the proceedings any attention. From time to time one of the G-men would turn a blank expression on General Pop. It was not certain they even knew he was a General.

"Regardless," said the G-man, "we don't want you to do any more bombing runs. On either Ula'ula or Poni Island."

"But my penis—!"

"Have you tried Vaseline?"

"Of course!" General Peckerham snarled. "Double applications."

"What about just letting the penis hang free of your trousers where it won't chafe?"

"What do you _think_ I've been doing?!" Peckerham screamed. He indicated his bare penis, drooped unceremoniously over the V of his fly.

"Well, I'm sorry, General. But you'll simply have to try something else. _No more bombs._ "

Peckerham's jowls shivered with his fury. To be spoken down to, and by a faceless government goon!

"This isn't the last you'll hear of me _or_ my scorched member," he said vengefully, collecting General Pop by the elbow and throwing open the door leading to the hallway. A pretty secretary seated at the reception desk saw General Peckerham's pecker and dropped the phone she'd been speaking into.


	18. Chapter 18

**18**

 _Strange Vibrations in Line at the Poké Mart... Refilled & Reloaded... A Girl Betrayed_

* * *

The great poet W. B. Yeats wrote: "Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold." It has always been true, and of many things; of empires, of systems of belief, of young love.

And now toward Bethlehem slouched something tragic indeed. The centre of Youngster Joey and Officer Jenny's relationship was beginning to fray.

After the regrettable incident with Tapu Bulu, Youngster Joey felt he needed a break from active duty, so Moon Child agreed to grant him a short leave so he could collect his thoughts. And Officer Jenny, trusting soul that she was, made the terrible mistake of lending Joey her police badge so that he would be able to talk his way out of whatever trouble he ended up getting into.

Back in town, Youngster Joey went into the first Poké Mart he came to and got in line at the pharmacy counter. The line, mostly due to the new lack of Tapu Lele's wholesome influence on the world's mental health, was unusually long and full of strange people.

"Do you have anything to cover up the airbag in my car?" asked a stooped, balding little man who had finally made it to the counter. The Pharmacist Joy who was filling prescriptions raised her eyebrows wearily.

"Some sort of shield, or spiky plate," he elaborated. "I was driving today and realized that if I got in a wreck, that airbag would probably save my life. But _just enough_ that I would wish I had died instead. I'd most likely end up some type of deranged cripple that couldn't even buy health insurance to cover the dozens of painful surgeries the wreck would leave me needing."

"I'm sorry, you—you want a… a spiked plate," Pharmacist Joy said.

The man nodded. "Something with big, sharp spikes. It would need to clamp or lock over the steering wheel so the airbag wouldn't be able to deploy, and spikes my face would hit to ensure my death in the event of an accident."

"What the fuck are you talking about," Pharmacist Joy said. She sounded like she was about to cry. It was two in the afternoon, and she'd been at work since six. She had not yet eaten, and she still had four more hours until her cousin, Pharmacist Joy, was supposed to punch in to relieve her.

"You don't have anything like that in an over-the-counter?" the man asked.

Youngster Joey was at the very end of the line. He looked elaborately around himself, trying to gauge how long it was likely to take him to reach the front. The prognosis seemed dire.

"Hey lady, outta my way," Youngster Joey said to the unsettlingly skinny woman directly ahead of him. He flashed Jenny's badge. The woman, who happened to be a Paralyz Heal addict with a natural fear of the law, shrieked and dashed out of the line and into the parking lot. In this fashion Joey cut a fairly efficient path through the queued patrons, dispensing one oddball after another. When he finally got near the front, the line's current leader was arguing with Pharmacist Joy about the validity of a prescription that had apparently been scribbled onto the back of a graham cracker.

"You can still read what it says!" the old woman screamed.

"I don't care what it says!" Pharmacist Joy screamed back. Her eyes bulged in her skull. "It's a goddamn cracker!"

"You twisted little slut," the old woman said. "You have no idea the kinds of things I've used to fill scrips. In 1947, when paper was so dear, my doctor used to write my hemorrhoid cream prescription on old unexploded mortar shells!"

Pharmacist Joy clenched her teeth so hard the small muscles of her jaw began to jump and twitch.

"Why, I recall that I once was allowed to buy a case of morphine from this very Poké Mart with a prescription shaved into the wool of a Mareep!" the woman cried. "This young generation is _perfectly incompetent_!"

Pharmacist Joy lunged over the counter and began clawing for the old woman's chest and throat. They grappled for a time. Eventually a Chansey came out of the back room and broke up the fight by smashing a large egg over the crown of the old woman's skull.

"You have ten seconds," Pharmacist Joy said to Youngster Joey as he approached the counter. "And it better be the simplest order of all time."

Joey flashed his badge. "Alolan PD, miss. I've run out of acid and need more."

"What?"

"You know. Lucy. Yellow Sunshine. Blotter squares. Microdots. LSD-25."

Pharmacist Joy's nipples grew so hard with rage that they became briefly visible through her stiff lab coat.

"Or what the heck, I'll settle for some crazy research chemical. Whatever you've got back there. As long as it'll send me into Ultra Space for about twelve hours."

Pharmacist Joy refused to respond.

"Ma'am, I'm afraid this is a very time-sensitive matter related to a criminal case."

Pharmacist Joy lowered her gaze, defeated.

Youngster Joey shopped around while he waited for his prescription to be filled. After about twelve endless strolls through the various bland aisles, Pharmacist Joy's tearful voice announced over the store's intercom that the order for "Joey, Youngster" was ready.

"Looks like this is a refill," Pharmacist Joy said as she rolled the top of the small paper bag closed and stapled the receipt to it. "Have you used this before, you little piece of shit?"

Youngster Joey laughed. "Of course!"

"And do you have any questions?"

He smiled and shook his head.

"Get out of my Mart," Pharmacist Joy said, flinging the little bag into Joey's face. He took his prescription into a nearby park, got comfortable on a bench near a small pond and a few cute palm trees, and dropped three tabs. He considered for a moment and then immediately dropped two more. An hour later he stood up, stretched, took in a lungful of the fresh air, and smiled. A little ways off in another area of the park was a miniature train designed to delight the children of Ula'ula with a long, scenic trip through the island's various locales. Youngster Joey saw other Youngsters like himself climbing aboard. He could feel his destiny calling.

The following day, Officer Jenny, whose hearing had by now reluctantly returned, got a call from her Sergeant.

"What were you thinking?" came the man's voice from the receiver. He chuckled. "Unbelievable."

"What? What's unbelievable?" Officer Jenny said.

"Christ, you'll have to turn in your badge." He laughed again. "I just can't believe you really _did_ something like that."

"Did what?!" Jenny cried, now feeling quite worried indeed.

"Tore apart that kiddie train!" the Sergeant said. She could hear him shaking his head in amused disbelief. "My god, Jenny, there were hundreds of witnesses. There's no reason to play dumb. You were flashing your police badge all over the place. I mean, that is, before you got too far gone on the gin in the conductor's car." The Sergeant laughed again, clearly impressed. "Someone said that at one point you took two whole bottles down from behind the bar. After that it was like trying to deal with a wild raccoon. They've got you going up and down the length of the train, from car to car, wrestling with people and singing in tongues. Christ, there was no way to get away from your crazy ass! As soon as you appeared in the doorway of the next car everyone inside would scream and try to huddle toward the other side."

Officer Jenny's heart thumped coldly at the base of her throat.

"I guess they wanted to stop the train to throw you off, but how the hell could they? The conductor didn't want to be responsible for getting two hundred or so little kids rear-ended by another train while they were stopped. All they could do was try to outlast you. Some of the children managed to barricade you in the caboose for about half an hour before you found that heating vent that led to the outside. Someone actually texted me a picture of you clinging to the side of the train like Spiderman, with your little blue cap turned backwards."

The plastic phone receiver creaked in Jenny's rapidly tightening grip.

"And then you had the nerve to heckle the tour guide in front of everyone when the train finally stopped at that scenic overlook. You apparently called him a 'rat-dicked little son of a bitch,' and kept screaming for him to get back inside and make you another drink." The Sergeant roared with laughter. "Man, I wish I could've been there."

Officer Jenny hung up the phone feeling numb and betrayed. She had been planning on being a bad guy with Youngster Joey until the end of their days, but she never in a million years would have thought he'd ditch her to go be a bad guy on his own.


End file.
